We’re excited to spotlight Chloe Singleton, Channel Director at eight&four, who recently shared her perspective on the future of SEO in a feature for TechRound. As AI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews reshape how people search online, Chloe offers a calm, strategic take. This isn’t a crisis, it’s a shift. One that smart brands should be preparing for.
“The panic that AI will replace search and kill SEO is real,” she acknowledges. “But the future of search isn’t a traffic apocalypse. It’s a shift in how content needs to be created and structured.” In other words, it’s less about gaming algorithms, and more about designing content that genuinely helps people and is easy for AI to understand.
She explains that AI search results aren’t necessarily better, just easier. “They’re not more accurate or more trusted. They’re just easier, frictionless, fast and increasingly everywhere.” And that’s what’s driving the change. AI tools aren’t trying to send users to your website. They’re trying to answer questions directly. So your content needs to become part of that answer.
The solution, as Chloe sees it, is to stop writing marketing copy and start writing for clarity. “That means writing clear FAQs, making great use cases and structuring answers to common questions.” It also means rethinking what success looks like. Instead of chasing clicks, we need to think about being cited, referenced and used by AI to explain something well.
She sums it up with a new SEO checklist. “It needs value. It needs authority. It needs to be digestible.” That means creating genuinely useful content, backing it with real expertise, and formatting it so that AI can parse it easily. Not just one article but a whole ecosystem of blogs, explainers, off-site mentions and internal links, all pointing to a credible source.
And perhaps most importantly, she highlights the growing role of the people behind the content. “We’re seeing AI tools increasingly prioritising content written by visible, known subject matter experts.” So if your brand is investing in expert-led thought leadership, interviews or media commentary, you’re not just building reputation. You’re building search equity.
The bigger takeaway? SEO isn’t dead - it has simply evolved. “We’re moving from click optimisation to citation optimisation,” Chloe says. “From writing to attract a search engine, to writing so that you can be quoted by one.”
We’re proud to see Chloe leading this conversation and helping brands navigate what’s next. If your business is ready to pivot from traditional SEO to a strategy built for AI-first discovery, now is the time to start.
Read the full article here.
